The Snowman

The Snowman (2017)

8% on Rotten Tomatoes (out of 137 reviews)

Runtime: 119 minutes

Directed by: Tomas Alfredson

Starring: Michael Fassbender, Rebecca Ferguson, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Jonas Karlsson, J.K. Simmons

From: Universal

Yes I have seen this and yes it is as atrocious as you've heard. Read the details below:

Mister Police... where's the rest of the script?

I haven't really dived into the Nordic Noir genre in any form, but I am familiar with it and before I had even heard of this film, I knew of author Jo Nesbo and the series of books based on the famous detective... Harry Hole. Yeah, it's pronounced differently in Norwegian so it's not hilarious there like it is in English, but it's impossible for me not to guffaw. Plus, the English pronunciation is used in the movie! I saw the trailers and they seemed fine and when it has a notable cast and a director in Tomas Alfredson who directed a movie I love (Let the Right One In) and a very good spy thriller in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, “a disaster” was something I never could have predicted, then I heard the toxic buzz a few weeks ago and I knew that something really went wrong. Then it actually came out and the reviews were absolutely brutal. Now I was curious... could it really be that bad?

Yes, yes it was.

From the trailers (which by the way are partially made up of footage that appears nowhere in the movie... and I am talking about important scenes such as the climax that were obviously changed) people should know this is about a detective who teams up with Rebecca Ferguson to stop a goofball who builds snowmen by the people that they murdered. I haven't read any of the book but multiple people have said it is far different and far more moody than the novel, which was a thrilling page-turner. Then there was how this was originally going to be directed by Scorsese (!) (boy did he dodge a bullet here; it's bad enough he is still an executive producer) and Afredson came on late in the game, and the shoot was way too short and somehow it wasn't discovered until editing that chunks of the script never got filmed, and even after reshoots an estimated 10 to 15% of the story did not even receive a second of footage. What a disaster.

As an aside, this does waste a talented cast, who are typically given nothing to work with. There is a famous actor who is in a few scenes (I am being vague as and he's had recent serious health issues. He's doing better now but at the time of filming... he did not look well. He was even dubbed; his presence in this film and the performance under those circumstances plays no part in my rating. I am glad he got a paycheck and I am happy things have not gotten worse. To steal a quote from someone else, this dubbed voice does not sound like the actor at all; instead, it sounds like Tom Hardy as John Fitzgerald in The Revenant! The worst part of that was how it was obvious you rarely saw this actor speak... then when I saw them try to do ADR and it was CLEAR the voice did not match what his mouth was doing, suddenly it made sense.

I am not sure if this would be any good even if they got to film everything their hearts desired; the script just may have been a crappy version of a good book, something destined to make those fans angry. Perhaps Harry Hole would have always been hyped up as “a great detective” and none of those skills would have actually been shown, as that's in the finished product. But I have to presume we wouldn't have had so many subplots brought up then forgotten about, and maybe all the time spent with Oslo getting the Winter Olympics... excuse me, “Winter World Games” would have had a point. Maybe there would have been actual clues for Harry to spot so he could solve the case by being brilliant instead of stumbling into things or the killer being really stupid and making himself known to Harry; yes, the main poster for the movie lied there. Perhaps there was an explanation for why on two occasions the villain was connected to the 1972 instrumental pop song Popcorn, by Hot Butter-you likely have heard it before and never knew its name-only for that never to be heard again. There's no logical explanation for why this person would love early 70's Moog/synth music.

But what we got, what a mesmerizing dumpster fire. The opening scene was rather confounding, and so is the ending, for different reasons. It's a crap sandwich, except the bread is made of sewage. I could go on and on concerning its badness but take my word for it, the poor reviews from critics, film fans and even the Average Jane & Joe (this has a D Cinemascore, for crying out loud), it's all correct. I realize that making Hollywood movies is quite the complex, taxing ordeal involving hundreds of moving parts so it's not surprising that even excluding the dreaded “studio interference”, many films are not as good as they could and probably should be. Here, I am baffled... this is a film released by Universal, with famous and respected people in front and behind the camera, and they wanted to make a series of films about a popular fictional literary character known by a certain segment of people all around the world... how did this go so badly they released the movie as is instead of trying to do even more shooting to fill in some of the gaps? Why is the script so different from the spirit of the novel? There's no reason for this to turn out as appalling as it did. The chances of this being a franchise have... melted away...